Harlem, USSR: Black Modernism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1937

The following essay tracks the translation of African-American poetry in the first two decades of the Soviet Union. Because the concept of race had no direct correlate in the Soviet Union, this essay argues that the translation of African-American poetry allowed Russian translators to publish modernist poetry that challenged the aesthetic imperatives of the Bolshevik party. To that end, the translation of Black modernist poetry—work by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and others—maps on to a canon of “socialist modernism,” an assembly of work that was both aesthetically and politically radical and one that pushed back against the Soviet conceptualizations of “socialist realism” and “bourgeois modernism.”